Welcome!

SHARE YOUR STORY

We’d love this blog to be a living, active archive of true stories about many different sorts of choices. As readers, you can share comments on these stories (and the general topic of choice) as well. We ask that comments on the stories be respectful. Please help us create an archive of the multitude of choices one can make. The political can be personal, and it can start here.

To share a story on the blog, attach the document or paste your story into an email and send to: choice.stories@yahoo.com. We will then publish it on the blog for you! You can choose to either give us your name, or sign the email anonymously.


Karen Bender, co-editor of Choice

“No one would listen to you he didn’t know it was his turn to talk next.” That’s from Edgar Watson Howe, a novelist of the 19th century.

Everyone I know, including me, is guilty of this. But this issue of Choice is so big, so powerful, so really complex, it means that we all should try to stop—for a moment, away--and listen.

Listening also means thinking about what we are going to say. Choice—or, in particular, abortion, is one of those topics in which wording becomes crucial and perplexing to analyze. Browsing some pro-life and pro-choice websites recently, I found some interesting ways of describing what happens during an abortion. The pro-life websites describe the fetus as the “body of the baby,” the “developing baby,” the “innocent heart,” and even, oddly, “the child’s body,” which seems to be taking quite a leap.

One pro-choice site described the “uterine contents,” which seemed not right either.

Another site described “embryonic tissue,” which gave me a precise scientific image.

What is gained by calling the “tissue” a “baby?” It’s a fast-forward, certainly, and the word “baby” definitely sentimentalizes the issue—who is against “babies?” Or innocent hearts, for that matter.

On the other hand, “uterine contents” can be a way of separating from the loss that may be part of the abortion.

Neither words address or include the mother who is making the decision, or include the situation that spur her to abort. The fetus is physically part of the mother. How can the wording include the mother? Perhaps we can get a sense from some of the stories posted here—the perspective of the mother, not only relating to abortion, but adoption, parenthood, birth control, abstinence--any of the choices a woman can make. We'd like to hear from men, too, about choices they have made.